Qualities and Characteristics of a Reflective Practitioner

• we teach to change the world
• we need to have full awareness of our motives and intentions
• things you assume to be true are not always
• engage critically with ideas and actions
• talk and listen respectfully to those who hold views different from your own
• model respectful disagreement and constructive criticism
• think about what we do: how do you know when you are teaching well? how do you know your students are learning? how could your practice be made more responsive?
• learn more from your students
• use your power with the learners rather than over the learners
• Ask myself: Why do I do what I do and how do I do it?
• work within and outside of preferred learning styles
• can stand outside their practice and see what they do in a wider perspective
• well-grounded rationale for practice
• help solve problems by looking for a manual, workshop, or person
• explain and justify ourselves to others
• we see our practice through other’s eyes
• we know why we believe and what we believe
• model critical inquiry
• the assumption that all teachers meet all students needs all the time lead to us feeling incompetent and demoralized
• see our practice from the other side of the mirror
• inviting colleagues to watch what we do
• engage in critical conversations with colleagues
• seeing ourselves as students makes us aware of actions and assumptions we have
• the learners help us gravitate towards certain ways of doing things and why we avoid others
• we know that students watch us closely and they are quick to notice and condemn any inconsistencies between what we say, we believe and what we actually do
• curricula do not just happen
• models critical inquiry in the practice
• we question institutional definitions of appropriate teacher and student roles
• alert to the presence of power in the classroom
• listen seriously and attentively
• classroom is always needing further investigation
• emphasizes peer learning to show trust
• justice, fairness and compassion - democratic process
• we discover our voice - speak about our practice is consistent
• lifetime voice

~Group Work with Sarah, Don and Connie
This is the wordle of our words:

This is the wordle of the class's thoughts:

A Vision of Students Today

This video is what I think of when I think of 21st Century learners. We are teaching students the skills and technology that will be obsolete when they actually need to use it. I mean think about it, I used an apple II when I was in elementary school. We told the turtle commands to make it draw different shapes. In high school we learned word perfect with out a tool bar and had to remember the short cuts. What of these technological skills are useful to me today? None really except the best thing that I learned was typing. Students today need to learn skills that will help them to use the technology! ( What company doesn't train its employees on their specific software when they are hired?) "People skills" such as cooperation, collaboration, listening, speaking, using manners/ being respectful are all important for the students to survive any type of workforce.



This is what I wrote about on September 28, 2010: Myths About 21st Century Learning
Myth: 21st Century Literacy is about technology only.
I think that the skills needed for the workforce need to be some of that of technology; however, the technology we teach them today, may be obsolete when they start their careers. I think that skills such as leadership, organization, common sense, judgement, problem solving, creativity, and reflection are important to the 21st century learner. Other things like social interaction ability, collaboration and communication (even if it is online should have proper grammar and comprehension!) are also important.

Myth: The digital divide is closed because schools provide computer and Internet access.
"The digital divide-the gap in access to and quality of technology-still exists". I see this in my colleagues schools! Some teachers don't even have a working lab--it is all what the principal finds important.

Myth: Teachers who use technology in their personal lives will use it in their classes.
If you are not pushed in the direction of technology and how to use it in your classroom, you probably won't use it. I used technology in my personal life--photography and blogs and facebook--did I use it in the classroom? No! In the computer lab I used to put the students on successmaker. Now, the time is more useful--wikis, blogs, movies...you name it --I will try it!

Myth: Teachers need to be experts in technology in order to use it effectively in instruction.
Let the expert show how to use it! This could be your students. Sometimes you won't be comfortable ---why not take the plunge and try it!

Myth: Automatic Essay Scoring systems will soon replace human readers of student writing.

This doesn't replace human interaction...even if it is online! 50% of our students loved how they could revise their work online immediately!

This is what I wrote on September 28, 2010: New Literacies and My Fall 2010 Field Study
Students will be able to see how cyberspace has expanded their view of the world. How they can interact with other people in another country at the drop of a hat. Students will use a variety of activities such as you tube videos, interactive games, partner sharing and critical thinking to figure out how to be responsible citizens on the web. They will also learn how to find appropriate websites and find information for research without copying from the web. Students will create a digital storyboard on what they have learned in this unit. In the end, we will use a wiki to see how well they learned the lessons on digital citizenship. 

Value of Education

I didn't think that research was important at first. It took a long time to find articles that related to what I was doing. Maybe that's because my field study, for example, was too restrictive, but I thought it was hard to find articles and that it didn't really inform my practice.

As the years progressed, I realized how informative it was to have others who had tried and tested what I was considering doing, in their own classrooms and they wrote what worked and what didn't work. Last semester, the articles we found were monumental in guiding the unit we created on Digital Citizenship. We found some great articles written by the ISTE that actually had the website (CyberSmart.org) that we used the most to create our unit! What a great resource that we can take and use in our classrooms.

This semester, we found articles on blogging that had sample survey questions, (pre and post), blogs to find that are kid friendly, and list of ideas for blog posts! What a great use of time--rather than re-invent the wheel! Also, this semester, I have been more vigilant in using twitter. only use it for educational purposes, and have been able to follow quite a few people who have posted great resources on their blogs.

Finding research through out this process has changed the way I teach. It has given me ideas as to which technology would be better for what I am doing in the classroom. At the beginning, I had no idea what a wiki even was and why would I use a blog in my classroom? My time in the computer lab was spent doing Success Maker and All the Right type. Now, my computer lab time is spent writing, commenting, and replying to each other in an online community. It is about collaborating on projects online. It is used for making digital projects using glogster and wordle. Finding resources on all of these technologies has changed the way that I teach!

Creating Community

Having my students two years in a row due to looping at the middle school I am at, I really want to create community in my grade seven classroom. I decided to see how an online community would differ from the "over comfortableness" happening in my classroom. I decided to use a wiki as my medium. I decided to ask the students using a survey what they liked to use the most for feedback: a) the wiki b) a post it note c) person to person. I also asked them which one (a, b, or c) they found most useful to make their piece of writing better. For the first question, the most common answer was c, yet for the second question, the most common answer was a. So even though they like to be social, they found the usefulness of the wiki to create a better good copy with immediate feedback to edit and change their piece of writing on the spot. I have been thinking about the difference in community between the wiki and my classroom and I am questioning why the wiki is better at creating a more positive community?

An interesting link: http://www.evenfromhere.org/?p=1352


An interesting article: Collaborative Learning the Wiki Way